A fault following an overnight software update at Openreach’s Cowes exchange left hundreds of Isle of Wight homes and businesses without broadband on Thursday. The outage was first reported by the Island Echo, with most complaints coming from Newport, Cowes and parts of East Cowes.
People using BT, Sky, TalkTalk, EE, Vodafone, Plusnet and NOW Broadband all reported problems. Those are different providers, but they use the same Openreach network. A fault at one shared exchange can therefore take several familiar broadband names offline at the same time.
The disruption began for some people on Wednesday night and continued into Thursday. Poundland, Card Factory and Correo Lounge were among the Newport businesses temporarily reduced to cash-only payments. Openreach says engineers replaced faulty equipment and completed the repair later that day.
Broadband evidence overview
Broadband evidence overview
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Source: fibredog.com
Choose a geographical area to populate the broadband overview
Once you have entered a UK postcode, town or city and selected Explore, this part of the tool, the broadband overview, will summarise the measured and reported broadband evidence for that geographical area.
It compares measured download and upload speeds, the real download range, tests below 30Mbps, latency, reported availability, changes over time, the size of the measurement evidence base and the broadband providers observed in the selected area.
The Island’s broadband has changed enormously
Fibredog’s local broadband data for the Isle of Wight includes 40,541 download results from 2026. The median speed now stands at 108.2Mbps, up from 48.7Mbps in 2022. That’s an improvement of 59.5Mbps in four years.
The experience still varies considerably between households. The slowest tenth of this year’s results came in at 32.4Mbps or below, while the fastest tenth reached at least 296.5Mbps. Around 29.6% of results were below 30Mbps, although that reflects the packages and equipment people were using as well as what was available at their address.
None of those figures explains Thursday’s outage, and they aren’t meant to. They show an island where everyday broadband has become much faster, but also why a failure at one important piece of shared infrastructure can still cause immediate trouble for homes, shops and other local services.
